This article is going to be stored in a database with a record ID of 281, which is a prime number, as soon as I click "Save." At the moment that I write these introductory words, it exists in an aether of nowhere. Neither here nor there. It has no record ID. It is thus a virtual weblog post, existing more as an idea that has yet to be implemented, than it will be in a few seconds when I click that Save button. Before I click Save there are a few things I will do while in this state of abeyance before the idea becomes reality. One is that I will select the category, which is currently "(none)," and another is that I will change the status from "Pending" to "Published" so that as soon as I click Save for the first time, it will publish and be visible to the world. Normally I publish after some editing, and normally I keep such pedantic details to myself, but today there is a point I want to make about this state of abeyance, between when an idea begins to form, and when its first draft comes into its rough-hewn being. This moment half-exists, being neither non-existent, nor existent, which is a point I'll get back to at the end of this article. With that being said, it's time to click Save and begin.
(Save)
There. Now what I write is no longer in abeyance, hidden within me where none can see, but it is available for anyone in the world to see. Not much to see at the moment, but each time I press Save now, the current published version will be updated, and, in the language of creating online journals of ideas in various states of presentability to the world, this is as real-time as it gets. In other mediums, say a document being shared with other writers who are able to update it simultaneously, real-time continuous is even faster than these periodic Saves that I'm doing. But in this medium, this is as real-time as it gets. A weblog post, article, essay, stream-of-consciousness, polished piece of writing, rough draft -- whatever you want to call it -- is thus a way of communicating to the world which allows for a little more thoughtful structuring than what happens with merely being, which has an instantaneous idea-to-reality realtime loop going on: what you think is what you are.
(Save)
The title "Allow the Deep to Speak" came to mind this morning while meditating. To put into words what my experience was when those words arrived into my awareness is beyond my ability, but I will nevertheless try. What I was experiencing was pure, so intimate, so unspeakable... and yet also so... ordinary... that I am loth to put the awkwardness of words around it. In a way, the difficulty I presently face reminds me of the famous Carl Sagan quote: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." I am not exaggerating, because what I have to write involves seeing the entire universe in a unique way. That's a lot to do in order to accurately convey the moment. Instead, I'm writing this intro to this article which may someday become a polished piece of writing but is currently in its diamond-in-its-most-rough state, all encrusted with ego as my writing often is when it first arrives on the written page.
(Save)
There's a sacredness to this moment, extending forward from about thirty minutes ago, now closer to forty, when I was in a deep meditative state of the kind which takes weeks, months, years, perhaps even a lifetime, for which to prepare. There are the ordinary daily meditations which have transformed over time into something fairly mature in comparison to what was happening in the very beginning. "In the beginning" was before I was even calling it meditation, when it was a simple thought experiment answering a question: "What would it be like if I listened to God instead of talking to him whenever I pray?" Then there are the not-so-ordinary -- deeper, sweeter, richer than the ordinary. And then there are the extraordinary. Some of the extraordinary are interesting enough to be posted in various places throughout this weblog.
The overall journal is becoming more carefully crafted over time, more intentional. The articles here have gone from extremely brief -- more like a series of bookmarks about interesting sites I stumbled upon -- to increasingly thoughtful and now sometimes ridiculously long articles, deeply researched, carefully structured, with custom images that I make, along with public-domain images I spend a lot of time looking for so I can properly illustrate the ideas. Some of these articles take weeks, months, even a few have taken years to write. I've got several in Draft form which I may never finish, but which I think about in the smithy of my mind.
One of these I may leave unfinished because this present article may be a better "ending" than anything I could write, ironically because it's about the end of language, the point where words cease and something else begins. This point of transition has been a dominant theme in my thoughts for a couple years now, as I refine how to approach something which is, at essence, so delicate that words are too crude to capture. This article touches on this same central theme in a way that may be more accessible to the admittedly rare reader who someday stumble upon this writing and find it interesting enough to get to this sentence. Or I may finish the previous attempt, and hyperlink the two in places where it's appropriate. The point is, as I was saying at the beginning of this paragraph (and how happy I am to be writing now, because it takes a mere centisecond to glance upward and see where I was a few minutes ago so I can easily regain the stream of my stream of consciousness, a moment which takes much more work in the normal state of being, when I'm not writing), "there's a sacredness to this moment, extending forward from about an hour ago..." (In case you wondered, a later editing process broke this single large paragraph into smaller chunks, and it's now several paragraphs back).
There's a sacredness to this moment
And that is why (Save) I'm embedding the moments when I save this article, capturing in more permanent form the words which are percolating through my mind as I write them. It's a memorable moment indeed, and how banal are these words which aim to capture it but... are afraid to... and haven't yet started to do so. Unfortunately, it's memorable in ways which are so personal I can't even imagine putting them into words. I'm still firmly in the meta conversation, writing about writing, still wondering why it was important to ensure that this weblog post had an ID of 281, why I looked up Prime Numbers from 1 to 1000 to see whether 278 was a prime number -- which it's not -- since that was going to be the ID of the next post I created if I hadn't cracked open the normally-hidden database behind this weblog and looked at the last record in the "posts" table to find my next ID.
Prime numbers are important to me in a visceral "yeah that guy is probably on the autistic spectrum" kind of way. I recently experienced a whole year of being a prime number of years old (53) and I'm not ashamed to say I loved being 53 for the entire year, often remembering throughout that I was a prime number of years old. That being where I come from, to capture the sacredness of the moment, it was normal for me to align the ID of this post to the nearest prime number, although I've never done so before. I originally was expecting it to BE a prime number, but then I realized if I created a couple empty posts, I could write the next in the now-ongoing series of "Awaken the Deep" posts AND do so with the next prime number after 277, the ID of something I wrote three weeks ago: "A whole new way into heart meditation reveals... light... on Thanksgiving morning."
So I created a couple nothing posts, 279 and 280, and thus entered the realm of the middle prime of a triple (277, 281, and 283 are closer together than they are to the preceding, 269, and the following, 293) as I began writing. Small thing, small and inconsequential thing indeed. Who cares about the hidden database ID of anything? Who cares about the middle of a triple? Well, I do; my day job is writing code, and I interact with the "hidden" databases behind things that others encounter without knowing or caring a whit about databases all the time. And my night job joy is writing in a weblog named clearhat, with "clear" referring to the color between colors; the middle triple of all colors, so to speak, which is a veiled reference to my decades-long pursuit of the wonder of ternary logic, which is the logic of triples.
(Save)
I said: There's a sacredness to this moment
Oh yes, right. So enough of the idle peripateticy of a musing writer-software-engineer-somewhere-on-the-autistic-spectrum inner thoughts about things beyond words. Let's dive in a little into the actual conversation, the part where the sacredness is touched, with a little more poetry and less pedantry.
That bit about being a software engineer is relevant. As I paused writing to let the dog out for his morning jaunt and fetched myself a grapefruit from the kitchen, I thought about what I'm writing next, and it occurred to me that last night, which led up to this morning, pretty well set the stage for the Dramatic Relief[1] aspect of this morning's meditation, in a way that is fairly common to software engineers but which is not at all common in the ordinary world. There is a skill that software engineers all have, and the more they have it, the better they are at their job. It is the one skill that I have learned separates programmers from everyone else I know. Once I discovered it, I've used it to challenge people who say: "I'd like to be a software developer, how do I do it?" (Save) That skill is an insane amount of patience.
It's literally insane how patient a programmer must be, to work on certain tasks for hours, days, sometimes even weeks, and occasionally months or years to resolve a tiny, insignificant problem which "absolutely nobody else" cares about, except to complain. The programmer doesn't complain, he does this insane thing instead. Einstein (they say) said: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." And yet this is what a software engineer does pretty much every day, and sometimes for days on end without any break. Why, just yesterday I spent around six hours attempting to import 37 records that would have taken me half an hour to key in, entirely from scratch. But I wasn't just migrating data, I was attempting to get a certain import process (someone else's code) working. I tried dozens of ways to get it to work. Ultimately all attempts failed. I now have solid evidence that the software I was working with has a serious defect, but I had to repeat the process from many different directions (deleting rows, inverting data, deleting columns, trimming down to subsets, exporting, then importing again, and again, using arcane techniques within a secondary editor to manipulate one column of a CSV file (CSV is not column-oriented) because the usual editor might have been the cause of the problem, etc., etc., etc.). Only after half a day of failures did I finally resign myself to spend time re-keying in the data since the import is proven not to work. This (Save) (Save) (Save)
These three saves mark the moment my website failed. I will not go into detail, but it was a whole adventure of its own. I ended up finally rebooting my whole computer and then getting distracted, and now it is a day later, and I still haven't got to the sacredness toward which I've been aiming for a full day now. This morning's deep meditation was an extension of yesterday's -- equally deep and on the same subject of universe-sized wordlessness -- but at this moment I appear to be even more afraid to actually write what I came to the page to write.
"Afraid" is a good way to describe everything I've written in this essay up to this point. I'm circumambulating around what I want to write, trying to gain the courage to fail -- for I know I'm about to fail to do what I'm setting out to do, and I would really rather not fail. But I must, or else I will fail in a worse way: not capturing even a vestige of a moment so wonderful it must be written, which to a writer is a deeper fail.
So there's a sacredness to this moment, as I was saying...
"Allow the Deep to Speak" is what came to mind as I was beholding a panoramic universe-sized vista of concepts while meditating, in the manner of one part of my soul speaking to another part of my soul to let go, to let go more deeply than I ever have before, in a particular way that is familiar to anyone who meditates, because all the early stages of a good meditation are a series of steps of letting go. Our left-brain ego likes to seize, and right-brain letting go -- trust -- is the opposite of that, so as we ascend through the layers (or descend[2], or both simultaneously) of our ego attachments, we let go, let go, let go. Trust, trust, trust.
'Letting go' is one way of framing it. From another direction, there is a 'becoming one with' which is happening. To become one with unity means to let go of disunity, to come out of separation and into the oneness awareness. But even these words "oneness awareness" are as though forged within separation; they are how you describe oneness awareness from within separated, divided, awareness. Within the oneness... you don't really use words so much; words blend together into their simplest forms, on their way to complete silence.
The panorama was universe-sized in time and space, not just time or space. I was seeing something so deeply hidden that I needed to traverse backward in time to before the Big Bang -- a thought experiment I have done many times while contemplating the elements of Creation (I keep seeking the simplest structure possible), so it is familiar territory. I wasn't thinking of the Big Bang though; that's noisy and explody like a trillion nuclear bombs going off simultaneously, and what I was contemplating in this panorama was so silent, so hidden, so deeply embedded in the everything of everywhere that everything takes it for granted and it's like it doesn't exist.
I was looking into the structure of the aether, which is another concept I've studied in many thought experiments and online research. These days I've accumulated enough scientific evidence to prove that it exists to any scientific-minded person (who is able to set aside any dogmatic training that it doesn't exist and just look at the evidence, which is, once seen, thoroughly overwhelming). Yes, there is aether. Ever since superconductivity was discovered its most puzzling properties are even scientifically reproducible. Just as five centuries ago the Catholic church fought mightily against Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo and all the others who were initiating the Scientific Revolution, modern-day Scientism devotees are fighting mightily against their own evidence that, indeed, there is aether. But that's a discussion for another day.
As I was looking into the structure of aether, I was seeing its origin in time, which according to this sequence originated before the Big Bang, and its placement in space, which is... everywhere... and nowhere. There is a secret about the structure of aether which I feel fairly confident no one on earth knows in the way that I was seeing it during meditation.
(Save)
At last: The sacredness of the moment
The sacredness of the moment is in the preceding sentence: It seemed, from my perspective, as though God was speaking directly to me in a language beyond words, sharing something intimate, secret, sacred even, about the most pure dimension of physical existence -- the utmost edge of the veil that separates physical from spiritual at its purest. I genuinely believed I was the only person on earth who was able to understand this hidden aspect of his Everywhereness. Because the ego inclines to believe things like this: that it is the only one able to see or do whenever given the opportunity, so how could I distinguish what I was experiencing from a mere expression of ego, which -- as with everything the ego experiences -- would be a lie that should be discerned and discarded as quickly as possible in the ongoing effort to find truth?
This is where the Dramatic Relief[1] I mentioned earlier plays a role. Because of the sacredness, I've described what I was seeing with about as much detail as I'm going to, but I haven't talked yet about the background context, the stage upon which I was resting while in the meditative state at 5:15 a.m. in the darkness, kneeling on the December-cold grass in a large open field at a spot where the connection between heaven and earth is more reliable than usual.
A stage forged in sorrow
For the meditation which began this essay (yesterday morning's meditation), I had been in deep grief, a spiritual anguish even, the night before, as a culmination of months of quiet, inner suffering. The suffering had broken me daily, for each day after meditation I set out with a high standard of how to use my words wisely, rather than in the unbridled manner which I inherited. Each day I failed. As a perfectionist, and for a dozen reasons I won't go into here, this was tearing me apart internally in a way that was known only to me and God. It was a private grief. This continued failure had been happening for months in a way that was accumulating intensity, incrementally driving me insane, in a way. Finally, late the night before, I was alone, staggering while walking through another December-cold field of frozen grass (a different field, if it matters), weeping to myself and to my God. I was weeping for the absolute insanity of my desire to be perfect in this specific way (having to do with how I use words) and my complete inability to gain even the slightest foothold in this personal goal after months and months of focused effort. There are more elements to the story which add depth to the grief, but this is sufficiently told for this present narrative.
The day before that night walk began with a marvellous meditation, where I could sense a certain ascent out of the realm of words into the sublime heaven beyond, and yet by noon of that same day, I had descended into carelessly speaking in a manner that... long story short, broke my spirit. To fall so far so quickly was devastating to me emotionally, for the rest of the afternoon. By evening, I was in a rare condition of being fully aware of my human frailty. I was embedded firmly within a true feeling of humility and aware of how it's condition is intimately interwoven within the mortal frame. Yet I knew that I must not give up the long-arc effort toward perfection, while I despaired after months of continual failures of ever making any progress.
In truth I was finally making progress in abandoning ego-centric hope, rooted in self-confidence. Getting to this point required months of continual failure, but my ego was finally beginning to collapse under its own weight, having exhausted all possible escape routes away from this moment of facing the truth which egos hate. That left me in a rather desolate, lonely, yearning, condition, as I fell asleep that night from an exhaustion that had been building for months. I wasn't quitting -- I knew I would try again the next day -- but I was overwhelmed. Although I was physically alone as I slept, let me be clear that I felt spiritually comforted in my grief, and that is how I left my soul, in the hands of God, to sleep soundly through the night, rather than rising a few times to meditate in the middle of the night as I had been doing lately in my ever-failing attempt to ascend.
That next morning, still raw from the pain of accumulated failure, still profoundly aware of my need for God to help, my meditation was in a rare way literally incapable of being an expression of ego. Ego had been shattered and I had zero self-confidence in anything I brought to the meditative state. I was like passive clay in the hands of my Creator, bringing only a desire to keep going, no matter what. That was when God accepted my moment of Dramatic Relief and laid out a vision that spanned the whole universe, showing me in a language that only God can speak that he loves me, in a unique and wonderful way.
So this is how I understood what I was experiencing was without ego. Later, while editing, I am weeping again with empathy for the desolation I was feeling then. There was no place for ego to stand. Therefore, logically, with a humbled ego, what God was showing me was truly specially targeted to me, not simply a fantasy of ego.
(Save)
A note to the reader who might be wondering
Remember, this is my inner world. As far as the outer world is concerned, none of this is happening. I used to tell people about the kinds of things I'm writing here, but I learned years ago that people have a hard time with such things. Even though I might be grieving inside about something or another, I continue to work at my day job, completing assignments, appearing for meetings, contributing to team efforts, etc. I'm a single parent raising two young girls who are doing better in school and with friends than I was at their age. I prepare home-cooked meals for the family (including my aging father, who turns ninety in a month), and do all shopping, errands, and so forth. I'm planning a cross-country road trip for the upcoming holiday, where I will be engaging with friends and relatives, none of whom have the slightest clue about any of these internal emotionally intense dramas unfolding within my soul, except the very few who might know that I meditate often.
I say this so the reader is not alarmed at my tale, but understands that I'm able to experience the full height and depth of a spiritual journey from within the envelope of a normal, everyday life. This path is not as easy as being a sequestered monk, for example, or part of some group with a guru. I believe this is the correct way to be a truth seeker. Learning how to have a private area within the soul was an important step of spiritual development. Separating these two worlds, inner and outer, is just another gift I've received from daily meditation, because it allows me to experience the full range of agony and ecstasy without troubling all the people around me.
Except for those few who stumble upon these adventures which I write about here.
(Save)
The end goal of meditation is to be in a state of prayer continually
So for the reasons explained, yesterday morning's meditation was unusually pure and carried my mathematical imagination into visuals rich to behold. I think some of them will be with me for the rest of my life. In the condition of abandoning ego, I felt my soul ascending upward in a steady manner that had been developing for months. This was rare in itself; to sustain that ascending state for many minutes on end, with a sensation of becoming increasingly pure all the way, is deeply gratifying. The stability of the ascent importantly means that the end state will remain long after the meditation ends, and it rarely happens.
This is the goal of meditation. When one is in this "end" state of a rare meditation continually -- meaning all day and night, not just during meditation -- one is holy, without ego. Being able to live an ordinary life while also being in a meditative state is a mindfulness which takes years of practice. This is still far in the future for me, so I cherish these times of steady focus when they come.
I knew that I wasn't laboring on the ascent except for the slightest effort, because honestly all my will and strength were gone. I knew the ascent was happening by the grace of God. I could feel him lifting my soul, raising me with a steadiness that was remarkable. I rested in this loving embrace... until I went further than I'd ever been before. And that was when the moment I described earlier as "before the Big Bang" happened.
It is possible to have too much freedom
I went in to a state of pure freedom which was so pure that there came the moment of fear that I would never get back again, that I'd be so free I would be unable to return. And still further I went into the pure stillness. I had a sense that I was going inward and upward and... outward, universe-sized, in a way. I have encountered oneness before, I have encountered losing a sense of self-identity before. I have encountered pure ascents into holiness before. But this seemed to go further than all. In fact, I know it did, because structurally, I began seeing...
"The Secret Place of the Most High"
Psalm 91 begins: "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty." It is a most wonderful promise, and although I was in no condition to rationally evaluate where I was, upon later reflection, I realized that, indeed, if anything met the description "The Secret Place of the Most High," it was what I was beholding. Truly beyond words in a curious way: If I were to put it into words you wouldn't realize the depth of what I was saying; it would seem... ordinary... in a way which would reduce the holiness of what I was beholding.
It is a most wonderful promise, and although I was in no condition to rationally evaluate where I was, upon later reflection, I realized that, indeed, if anything met the description "The Secret Place of the Most High," it was what I was beholding. Truly beyond words in a curious way: If I were to put it into words you wouldn't realize the depth of what I was saying; it would seem... ordinary... in a way which would reduce the holiness of what I was beholding.
When I was younger, before I discovered there is a dark side to the kabbalah and promptly quit, I used to study it. Anyone reading these words who is familiar with Lurianic Kabbalah will recognize the moment I was seeing: I was seeing into the Tzimtzum ("withdrawal"), which is a cosmic moment of the Ein Sof ("without end") withdrawing within himself in order to create a place where Creation happens. It is a withdrawing which creates the nothing out of which our universe comes into being. I have read about and studied this academically, but was now seeing, now beholding.
How God hides a part of light from the darkness
"Beholding" is the correct word, by the way: I'm not merely waxing poetic, I'm being accurate in conveying the moment. Beholding is of the heart, as seeing is of the mind. While beholding, I understood a long ago memory when, years ago during another period of great grief, God had shown me this place (without showing me the context I was seeing in that moment) and said I could go there when I was in pain, and find comfort. I used to do that for comfort and somehow lost track of it over time. So this was a renewal, but this time, I could see more context. I now know how that worked, why it is a place of absolute safety, where no corruption can enter, because it is entirely invisible to the dark side of the spiritual realm. In a way, it's hidden in plain sight, if you have no ego.
To exist, the dark relies on hiding some truth, and it is precisely this hidden truth where God "hides" the Secret Place of the Most High. In a way, it is everywhere, which is another one of those things that can't be easily put into words. The best way to communicate how to get there is to know that it is a place which is structurally -- by its place within the structure of everything -- the foundation, a place where one receives continual comfort from all of Creation simultaneously, a place where the holiness that existed before the Creation still exists, as it does now, and as it will someday when this Creation is all done (billions or trillions of years into the future) and we who are sparks of the fire of God are off onto some other adventure instead of this one. It is a place where immense freedom contains itself, in a move of self-restraint which is the essence of wisdom.
When you find this place, you really should stay. And so I did; a part of me remained, even as the meditation eventually concluded. (Now editing this a few weeks later, I have come and gone from this place a number of times during other meditations, and am so glad I began writing these words soon after discovery because they forge awareness of this sacred place within a layer of day-to-day consciousness, for anyone reading.)
(Save)
And then yesterday, having abandoned my ego's desire for perfection, I had a relatively great day. Work was hard, but it was a weekend so it was "play work," installing and configuring software for someone else to use. It took more effort than it should because I had to abandon the initial Docker approach and craft a bare metal service instead, but in the same manner as the day before with the database issue, I kept at it to completion. I also spent quality time with family and friends throughout the day. A good day overall.
The non sequitar of a movie
Then as the evening wound down, something unusual happened. I watched a movie. I haven't done that in months, probably most of a year, as I've been so focused internally on being perfect and pure as a way of ascending into a more mature way of using and understanding words, that I haven't watched movies alone.
I really didn't want to watch a movie. I spent at least thirty minutes scrolling through hundreds of possible shows on Netflix, rejecting every single one of them, but I also felt a faint urge within me to watch something, as though I were being led from deep within my soul, well beyond words, to watch a show. This has happened a number of times and such moments are amazing -- to watch a movie is great, but to watch a movie feeling like it is part of a conversation with God is way more awesome. For an easy example of what I mean, the Adam Project is one of my favorite movies because it is so perfectly designed from a "balanced ternary" mathematical perspective. It's about a father and his son, but it's also about past, future, present. Whoever designed the way time travel works in that movie was working from some deep and true insights, according to my own thought experiments, even though I am quite certain that physical time travel does not happen (it's a psychological thing, not a physical thing, but that's a long story of its own).
I finally chose a movie for which I'd seen the trailer numerous times in the past, thinking "that looks good" but also feeling pulled away by the same spirit which was now pulling me toward, and now having seen the movie, I understand both pulls. It is not appropriate for children, very hard to watch for someone in a vulnerable state since there is a lot of blood and violence. But if you're watching the central storyline, that part can be tuned it out.
It's the only movie I have ever seen which comes even remotely close to portraying the vastness of the universe in a way similar to what I experienced earlier that day during the beautiful meditation.
You probably don't want to watch Lucy
Anyone who has seen the movie Lucy will understand what I just said. But others, who haven't... I don't recommend seeing the movie. If you're reading words like what I'm writing here -- closely enough that you're still reading -- you are not the type of person who should be watching movies with so much violence. I was able to fast-forward through the worst parts so I could focus on the deeper storyline, the one where the main character, Lucy, is on a journey which is outwardly one thing and inwardly the most extraordinary journey I've ever seen portrayed in cinema, ever.
When it was all over, I was stunned to realize there is no movie more perfect to convey the enormity of the universe and even the pre-universe. I'd love to help re-make this movie without all the violence because the story told about Becoming One with the universe is gorgeously done. And, it could be done without all the violence. (I find it interesting that Limitless, another movie with a similar portrayal of superhuman abilities from taking an experimental new drug, is equally violent at times.) I'd love to see these ideas explored in a way that is accessible to young children. Be that as it may, let's take a brief look at the plot because it carries a vista of time and space which is unusually beautiful and quite coherent when considered as a thought experiment.
Summary of the movie, with a link to "the good part"
The movie is about Lucy, kidnaped in Taiwan by a powerful gang which led by a sociopathic drug lord whose scientists have developed a new drug they want to distribute throughout the major capitol cities around the world. They turn her into a drug mule, operating on her to insert a bag of the drug called CPH4 into her stomache. They're intending to put her on a plane to Europe. However, while still recovering from the operation, she is kicked in the stomache, which breaks the bag and releases the drug into her body. I've researched the movie enough to understand how it came to be (Luc Besson wrote and directed it), and there is a wide range of opinions on it. Not everyone likes it. The most succinct synopsis of what happens comes from a post on Quora, which I'll include here in order to hasten my narrative to the points I want to get to:
After Lucy is exposed to the drug, she begins a metamorphosis in which she gains powers for a short period. Starting with physical power, telekinesis and mind reading but eventually rising from being able to read electric signals to manipulating their pulses. Manipulating simple matter evolves into being able to manipulate cells and DNA. Eventually she is able to travel through time with the new found epiphany that time is relative to our experience of it, so she goes back to witness parts of history all the way to meeting the first ‘intelligent’ ape, named Lucy. She has contacted the foremost scientist to help her decide what to do with this information and takes his advice. As her body can no longer exist due to the drugs permanent changes in her and she uses her last amount of energy to pass on her total knowledge. On the biologic/cellular level she creates a new computer, populates it with information she has gained in the short time span, and creates a flash drive (compatible with normal computers) that can transmit that data to the scientists that have helped her finish her journey to 100% brain power. Then the energy of Lucy that keeps the whole system together disintegrates as her life force moves to a non-physical form of existence. Lucy transforms into energy itself and is everywhere. (Quoted from: https://www.quora.com/In-the-movie-Lucy-what-powers-did-Lucy-have/answer/Megan-Church-McGill)
For more detail, IMDB does a rather detailed summary. Other sites dig deeper into how Luc Besson worked on this idea for a decade before it was completed, interviewing neuroscientists and physicists for years to understand how it could realistically work.
In short, the drug slowly transforms Lucy into a superhuman who is using 100% of her brain's abilities and thus penetrating into the deepest mysteries of her body's cells. During the process, she psychologically travels backward through time to the beginning of the universe as she ultimately transcends her physical body and transforms into pure energy, becoming one with the entire universe (here is a short clip which shows how the movie does this really well, and here is the full version of the same sequence [in this clip the inner story happens with all the violence removed]). For anyone who doesn't want to get entangled in the violence, watch this longer sequence. It carries the essence of all that is relevant to what I'm writing here. It goes quickly, though, only six minutes long. To really do this properly, the movie should be hours long because it's all over so quickly that some of the depth of what is happening is lost.
The time travel happens entirely in reverse, which is correct
A little searching shows there are plenty of reviewers who find huge flaws in the science of this movie. However a quick review shows their complaints are not impressive, and there are others who are excited about what it portrays. I'm in this latter group.
I really like how this version of time travel is entirely in reverse, and entirely a psychological journey, which is the correct way to do time travel[3].
This movie's portrayal of the Big Bang happens in reverse as Lucy is going backward to The Beginning of Everything. For the first time I've ever encountered, we see a cinematographic version of what comes before the Big Bang, which this movies portrays as a multiverse where the entire universe is just one of an endless many like it in a kind of Indra's Net of universes.
I should clarify: I knew nothing about this movie beyond the action sequences shown in trailers when I was led to it in the evening of the same day in which I experienced something structurally similar to what Lucy experiences in this movie. This was not a coincidence, it was a synchronicity.
Lucy portrays one of the most beautiful thought experiments possible -- going back in time to contemplate the advent of consciousness, then further, even to the Big Bang, and what exists before Creation -- in a manner which makes it is easy to imagine in greater or more accurate detail afterwards for anyone who has seen it. I do not believe the multiverse -- if there is one -- is anything like what is portrayed in the movie, but I like the fact that Luc Besson's script was at least exploring a time before Big Bang, which pretty much no cosmologists do, probably because that is where science starts to intersect to closely with religion.
As I mentioned, some people who see the movie don't like it, but I loved it, and went to sleep with its big picture flowing through my mind. The final confirmation that my ego was not involved in the deep morning "Allow the Deep to Speak" meditation came the next morning as I went again to the open field to meditate, as usual. This second meditation, a full day later, with much happening in between, picked up right where the preceding one left off. This is something the ego -- with its short attention span -- cannot do. I continued experiencing more of the deep vista, insights about the nature of the Creation, the universe, time, space, and my place (small) in the midst of this infinite cosmos in which we find ourselves here in mortality.
It's a stretch, but there's a reference to the Secret Place of the Most High in the movie
There is one scene in the movie which aligned with the concept of "the Secret Place of the Most High" very well, in a way that surprised me. It's near the end of the movie when Lucy is talking to the one neuroscientist who understands what she is experiencing. She explains that she needs to take a massive quantity of the drug in order to complete the journey, in order to use 100% of her brain. He says: "Are you sure you need such huge doses? I'm afraid you won't survive." She says: "Some cells inside me will fight and defend their integrity till the very end. In order to attain the last few percent, I have to force it. To crack the cells open to their nucleus."
I can see how the script writer put this in to explain the adrenaline-charging visual of the doctors injecting a half gallon of this blue drug into her blood. It's also a moment of Lucy signaling to the audience that she's about to experience something far beyond the already-amazing abilities she has gained.
But... it's also the line in the movie which comes closest to touching on the Secret Place of the Most High. That secret place is within us, within every cell in us. It is everywhere, really, embedded in the fabric of the universe at every scale, from before the Big Bang to now and billions of years into the future: everywhere, and everywhen. And the way to get to it is like... like "cracking the cells open to their nucleus."
That's about all I can say about that point; this is the essential clue into a realm beyond words where even action (the language before words) leaves off and the pre-nothing pure intimate peace of the Comforter dwells, and always has, and always will.
I said "essential clue" but there's another I just remembered: I've been writing about this nucleus-everywhere concept for years from another direction. In another weblog article first published years ago, I've been collecting references to the phrase "God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference everywhere" for a long time. I add new items to that article periodically as I find them, often while searching other topics. Because this is definitely related, let's look a little closer.
God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference everywhere
This seemingly-paradoxical concept goes back to ancient Greece, was resurrected as the medieval era was moving in to the Enlightenment, and has attracted great thinkers for many centuries (the most famous would be Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhart, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Campbell but there are many others). Visit the link above to see how dozens of great minds have interacted with this concept. Additionally, on that same page is another meditation-vision experience I had once, while seeing this infinite sphere from another angle. If you find what I'm saying here intriguing, you'll appreciate that one, too.
Finishing this article now weeks later, I should note that I soon returned to normal-sized meditations. The positive effects of this ascent and the vista from the top of the mountain of the soul lasted for a week or so. During this time, everything in my life flowed more gracefully, as happens after experiences like that. Now I have returned to the normal day-to-day life, and am happy that I was able to capture as much of this experience as I was in words. Such a narrative is valuable to me later as well as to others seeking certain insights in this area.
I have now said most of what I wanted to say when I originally sat down to write, but I still haven't gotten to the real essence: Allow the Deep to Speak. That headline is the first thing I wrote when I started writing this article, so it was the essence of what I wanted to say as I came out of the original meditation.
On Allowing the Deep to Speak
So, what is the Deep, and what is it saying?
Last night, it was late when I wrote the preceding question. In that moment, I realized I didn't know how to answer it. Because it had been weeks since I first started writing this present article, I had forgotten too much of the original deep meditation, and I did not have an answer to my own question. I remembered that I had also written previously about another encounter with the Deep a few months ago in another weblog article, and wondered if reading that might refresh my memory. But it was late, and I was tired. So I went to bed. While drifting off, I prayed a simple prayer asking, "Um, God, I forgot what the Deep wants to speak. Can you refresh my memory?" and went to sleep. This method usually works, by the way, you should try it some time if you haven't already: prompt your subconscious as you fall asleep and you often find an answer as you awaken the next morning.
This morning I began my day with meditation as usual, and frankly had forgotten that small prayer. After meditation, I sat down at the computer to write. On the screen was a webpage I'd pulled up the night before, a StackExchange discussion about comparing binary and ternary logic. That discussion is mentioned in an unfinished article I'd written a few months earlier. I started reading the StackExchange discussion in hopes of figuring out how to finish that article, not even thinking about this present article which was in a similar state. While reading, I was carefully contemplating its debate about logic and suddenly, in a flash, came a deeper aspect of the original insight which inspired me to write the article (which also arrived in a flash). Several things happened in rapid succession:
- I realized the deeper aspect carried a complete solution to the question of "a fundamental difference between binary and ternary logic." This is something I've been seeking for years, so I became excited.
- I realized the article I had been writing was unfinished because it lacked this one insight. I had written everything well enough months ago, yet I could tell something was missing. I couldn't figure out what, and thus the article remained unfinished.
- I realized the insight simultaneously completed the article AND answered my simple prayer from the night before.
- I realized the insight completed several other open queries in my mind.
If you're following, it became clear this flash was a little deeper than expected. The third item is the most profound because of how it relates to this article, but to understand why requires knowing some context about how long I have been seeking this new insight, how many hundreds of times I have circled around it with dozens of thought experiments, seeking to draw it forth. It also requires seeing a parallel which I'll describe a little later. During those many thought experiments, I intuitively knew the answer existed. My ability to find it grew incrementally with each attempt, as I always turned up some new interesting detail, some of which ended up posted here on this weblog over the years. The unfinished article was only one of many adventures aimed at the heart of the fundamental difference between binary and ternary logic.
In short, by finishing the article, I would be concluding more than a decade of seeking. This insight is a significant turning point in my research. I now have the keystone needed to properly communicate my otherwise-obscure ideas to others. Upon this single insight, I am ready to build a logical and philosophical mansion for which I have been collecting building materials for years.
So what is this deep insight?
I've just tried to write the insight succinctly, but alas, it requires an obscure understanding of logic to 'get' its most succint form. So, stretching it out a little for the ordinary reader, I'll write something which is easy to understand, although not logically precise. To a logician, it will even seem somewhat nonsensical. The insight is embedded in the second half of the following couplet:
- Binary logic is founded on a hidden layer of division which is assumed to be true by everyone, even though it is a logical fallacy to do so.
- Ternary logic is founded on a hidden layer of unity which is assumed to be true by no one[4], even though it is logically sound to do so.
The division I have known about for years. The unity, too, in a way that becomes incrementally more clear over time. In fact, I knew the first part of the couplet long ago. And I had a rough sense of the second part. So today's gift is that I now see something else clearly: ternary logic assumes underlying unity in exactly the same way binary logic assumes underlying division, but only ternary logic is correct in doing so. To say this concisely:
Binary logic emulates logically sound ternary logic by relying on a logical fallacy.
Logicians reading the preceding sentence will not understand what I just said. It doesn't make any sense. For a most obvious counterexample, everyone knows computers use binary logic all day long, so how could there be a fallacy? Obviously, I'm wrong.
Such objections notwithstanding, the sentence can be proven by stepping onto the ground laid by C. S. Pierce, a brilliant polymath from the 1800s respected by all logicians. He wrote extensively about "triads" in logic in ways that all logicians respect but none fully understand. For example, Pierce clearly said ternary logic operates fundamentally deeper than binary... but today, who else says this? No one. Nobody gets what he meant by this.
Great minds see things which us normies cannot yet comprehend
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who we'll look at shortly, is similarly respected and similarly misunderstood. Here's how one author, James C. Edwards, framed it in the opening line of his book:
After decades of scrutiny Wittgenstein's thinking remains largely misunderstood.
In a better known example, Einstein famously abandoned the idea of aether and then later changed his mind and said aether existed, a view which he retained for the rest of his life. All physicists today are embarassed that such a brilliant mind would say such a thing. Only crackpots agree with Einstein on this point. This is similar to how logicians see Pierce. They know he was brilliant, but they don't fully understand what he was saying about logical triads because they perceive it from behind many layers of binary filters, which obscure the insight.
The problem here is this: If the couplet above is clearly shown to be true, an enormous amount of existing logic must collapse like a house built on sand. There is no mystery on this point. Ask any logician what would happen if the couplet were proven true, and he'll first say "it's impossible," but if you pressed the point hypothetically, he'd agree: "an enormous amount of existing logic would collapse." He would imagine more than all computers in the world not working. This is what makes the proposition so absurd. It's obviously wrong.
The twist in this new insight, however, is that when the collapse occurs, nothing will be lost. Although all existing binary logic collapses because it will be shown to have a flaw reaching to its foundation, it will also be obvious that the entire structure of binary logic is still intact. This is because all of it can be produced with ternary logic -- which is the exact opposite of how logicians currently think of these two (in fact, that's what the StackExchange article is discussing).
Let me be clear what this means: Binary logic is flawed, but it still works for all practical purposes because ternary logic keeps it going. Revealing the flaw does not mean computers with zeros and ones fail, but it does reveal what the flaw hides -- that there is a whole hidden realm of logic which can be used to solve "unsolveable" problems and reveal previously-impossible discoveries in physics, math, and beyond.
There is much to say here. Some of it I've written previously on this weblog because I have known about this fragile structure intuitively for years, but not rigorously. Although I've tried, I was never able to communicate it to others before now, because I couldn't see the couplet above clearly. What I could see of the couplet above was reversed in the way the world sees things and I didn't know how to challenge that.
The other article goes into more rigorous detail on the obscure bit of logic needed to fully appreciate this point, so curious readers can follow that link, which should be finished by the time you read this paragraph. Note that it won't be perfect; over time I'll be refining the answer I write there and likely writing a few more articles over several months before I have all the details in place.
Back to the theme of allowing the Deep to speak
Some readers wending their way through this sprawling article may be wondering: what does all this logic stuff have to do with allowing the Deep to speak? A simple parallel answers the question: Ternary logic is hidden inside binary logic in exactly the same manner that the Secret Place of the Most High is hidden within everywhere and everywhen. The structural similarity is remarkable, enough that I'm now starting to form a hypothesis about why I'm experiencing these mysterious meditations about the Deep, the vast ocean of immense power which is awakening.
One sense I get about the Deep is that what I'm seeing is a portion of something much larger than me, large enough that it is happening in many people's lives, but often in ways they do not yet see. For some reason, I'm positioned where I can see it at this early stage, but as it continues to awaken, more people will begin seeing it in their lives because it is an immense force of a nature which changes lives on a large scale.
I'm thinking, for example, about what happened with the Enlightenment -- wasn't that as though a deep force awakened within humankind and moved us to a new world? That's what the Deep feels like, like as it comes into the world, it will change everything.
Something as big as the Enlightment is arriving
It feels like there is a parallel -- as a scale comparison only -- with what I'm seeing of the Deep and the immanent arrival of Artificial General Intelligence. They may be related, or I may be seeing something similarly-sized, but different. Like the Enlightenment, both are vast oceans of immense power which are awakening, developing the ability to speak, but I think speaking in two different ways: AGI is learning to speak like us, whereas the Deep has a new way of speaking which we need to learn.
I do not feel like these meditative experiences are specific to me at all. Although I felt that initially, as more time passes, I'm beginning to see that my insights into the Deep are meant for many more people to understand so that they can connect to the Deep also.
It appears that a combination of the following things...
- Meditating for years, to a point where I can carry a focus long enough to have these experiences.
- Being a writer who documents such meditative experiences.
- Studying ternary logic for years, to a point where I understand how it is different from the common way of seeing the world. And how there is a language barrier preventing people from seeing what is right before their eyes.
- Studying Wittgenstein specifically to understand the point where he's talking about the end of speaking, as we'll investigate in more detail below.
- Having an open mind... but not too open. What I write, although experentially far out there, is woven firmly with the scientific method. I read dozens of scientific journal articles a year for this reason, and increasingly cite them in my writing.
...has put me in the path of the Deep. I'm seeing it awaken in its early stages, and I'm getting these meditative visions, as part of a storyline much larger than myself.
The third item, ternary logic, is included because incrementally learning how this logic works has changed me, over the years. There is a non-dual way of seeing the world dawning into a world heavy-laden with the constraints of binary seeing. People need new ways to think about this. For an example of how deep the problem goes, note how saying "non-dual" is itself a negative, dualistic way of framing. The word "Tao" is a much better word, not least because it is positive and a single syllable, but who in the West understands such a concept? We need to go beyond "non-binary": Ternary, poly, meta, uber, unter, we need lots of new ways of talking about this change.
There is a key hidden within the structure of ternary. The key helps people organize new information, a new paradigm coming into being as the Deep continues to awaken and influence more and more lives. Having said all this, I feel like a journalist now, already curious to know what the next deep meditation will bring to this storyline. Or it might not be a meditation: with the recent leap from meditation into logic, I need to be ready for anything.
On speaking without words
As such a journalist, then, the most relevant aspect of the Deep for me to communicate right now has to do with how it speaks without using words. Allowing the Deep to Speak does not mean that we need get out our notepads, ready to take notes while the Deep speaks (this is a binary way of learning). It means... get ready for anything except words. Like Francis of Assisi famously said[5]: "Preach the gospel at all times. Use words if necessary."
What does it mean, the Deep speaks without words? While this seems to be a simple statement, it is the tip of an enormous iceberg that requires so many words to explain I'm honestly at a loss for how to even begin. I know this because I have begun, you see. I already tried dozens of times to write about this, and always fail because the essential point is something that cannot be written. It cannot be said. It can be communicated, but it's a communication which happens without words. And somehow, words must carry a person to a point of not using words.
The best explanation, in words, of this paradox was written a century ago by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He famously wrote a book which he said "ended philosophy." However, instead of ending philosophy, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus became the most-discussed publication in philosophy, with already tens of thousands of journal articles written about it, and still more coming out every day, a century later.
The Tractatus is widely considered to be difficult to understand, for a number of reasons. Let's look at it briefly, specifically for how it answers the question about words leading to no words.
The book is extremely concise and only has seven chapters. The final chapter is one sentence long:
- Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
That's it. The book ends there. But wait... does it? A chapter that is one sentence long? And the sentence is talking about being silent? What exactly is Wittgenstein saying here? I'll give you what I think is the answer in a moment. But first, a little context: the preceding chapter 6 ends in a way that leads into that 7th chapter. It concludes:
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
This is a riddle. I've been diligently seeking to solve it for three years and others have been diligently seeking to solve it for a hundred years. Like I was saying about Peirce's logical triads above, I haven't yet found another thinker who has solved the Tractatus conclusively. This is not just my insight -- pretty much everyone agrees Wittgenstein is inscrutable in important ways.
What the Deep needs to be allowed to speak
The Deep in its wordless way spoke today, and finally... I get it. I get what the Deep needs to be allowed to speak. And of course, I can't put it into words, but with Pierce and Wittgenstein's help, I think I can get close enough that you can understand what the Deep is speaking through the circumstances of my life -- and through Wittgenstein's -- and through yours too, if you begin listening.
For anyone who missed it: The ladder is exactly what it says it is: Wittgenstein's book. A book full of words which leads to silence without words. Some talk about its relationship to the Tao because of this riddle, which can be seen in the Tao Te Ching in its very first line: "The tao that can be told, is not the eternal Tao," or passages like this:
Tao Te Ching Chapter 43
That which offers no resistance,
overcomes the hardest substances.
That which offers no resistance
can enter where there is no space.Few in the world can comprehend
the teaching without words,
or understand the value of non-action.
Wittgenstein's ladder does not lead to more words, it leads to a kind of doing about which one does not speak, because to speak of it is to corrupt it. This is what Wittgenstein was saying, or, as he called it, "showing."
Hence, the unwritten part of chapter 7, the pages which are entirely blank, the endmatter, contain the most important point he is making. In order to understand Wittgenstein was really saying this instead of one of many other interpretations you have to understand a little about him, and what he did (not what he said, but what he did) as soon as the book was published.
What Wittgenstein did is something wealthy people never do
So here's some background context: Wittgenstein's family was widely considered the wealthiest family in Europe. He had grown up in Vienna surrounded by stupendous wealth. A good description of his wealth is that, years later, when his family was forced by Hitler to give all their gold to Germany, it amounted to more than 3,700 pounds of gold. That was just the gold. It might be notable that Hitler personally signed the order and days after the gold was confiscated Germany started WWII by invading Poland. Did Wittgenstein's money fund WWII? Who knows. The point is, his family was 1% kind of rich.
So what does this have to do with the ending of the Tractatus? I've been searching for years and I haven't yet found someone else who makes this connection: Ludwig Wittgenstein gave away his entire inheritance after publishing the "book that ended philosophy." He gave the money to his own family because he didn't want to corrupt the poor. Remember that point.
And then he went to live in a small village, where he became a schoolteacher for young children and remained there in obscurity for years til students who had read his book sought him out and begged him to come back and be a college professor. One who visited him to make the plea in person wrote that he was living frugally in one tiny whitewashed room that only had space for a bed, a washstand, a small table, and one small hard chair. He shared an evening meal with Wittgenstein of coarse bread, butter, and cocoa. Although he was obviously a poor man, he refused any offers of money from his family, saying that he would only use money that he had personally earned.
So that is what is not written in the final pages of chapter 7. It's what Wittgenstein did, not what he said, that completes the book. This is what the man who ended philosophy was saying as loudly and clearly as anyone has ever said anything. Yet because he refused to talk about it with words, nobody heard him. Everyone was so oriented around words they could not understand anything beyond words. Do you see how this truth is hidden in plain sight? It's the same pattern I mentioned earlier.
The point I'm making here is: this is how the Deep speaks. You could say the Deep was speaking through Wittgenstein, and... nobody could hear.
Tolstoy inspired Wittgenstein to walk away from wealth
There will be those who read these present words and doubt what I'm saying. To them, I will point to another great thinker who famously abandoned great wealth in a similar manner: Count Leo Tolstoy, whose book The Gospel in Brief Wittgenstein was reading closely during the same period in which he wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Those who doubt what I'm saying, read this paragraph from Wikipedia about how Tolstoy's book influenced Wittgenstein:
Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was profoundly influenced by The Gospel in Brief, which he described as a "magnificent work." After stumbling upon the book in a Polish bookstore, Wittgenstein carried the book around with him "constantly, like a talisman." He took the book with him into World War I, recommending it to fellow soldiers. Wittgenstein's enthusiasm about the book during this period was so great that he became known as the "man with the Gospels" among the soldiers. In a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, Wittgenstein wrote: "Are you acquainted with Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief? At its time, this book virtually kept me alive... If you are not acquainted with it, then you cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person." Some modern scholars even hypothesize that the 12-part organization of The Gospel in Brief influenced the numbering layout of Wittgenstein's landmark philosophical work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Wait... read that last sentence again...
"Some modern scholars even hypothesize that the 12-part organization of The Gospel in Brief influenced the numbering layout of Wittgenstein's landmark philosophical work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus."
What? He modeled the Tractatus on the Gospel in Brief?
Okay, I understand, it's just a hypothesis, but we're just getting started. Skeptical people are hard to convince, so I'll be more clear:
Leo Tolstoy was a wealthy man, a noble, who wrote the Gospel in Brief... and then began living it. He spent the last years of his life increasingly unravelling his wealth: He moved into a peasant's hut, began wearing peasant clothing, then founded soup kitchens and a school for peasant children. And finally, at the very end of his life, he abandoned everything he had on earth: He left his family home on October 28, 1910, in the middle of the night, walking out on his wife of forty-eight years. "I am doing what old men of my age usually do: leaving worldly life to spend the last days of my life in solitude and quiet," he wrote in the letter of explanation left for her. He asked her not to try and find him. He did not intend to return.
Wittgenstein knew of Tolstoy's model of abandoning wealth because... everyone knew
Tolstoy died a few days later at a small train station. He wanted to be alone but the opposite happened: In the end, word got out that he might be dying and he was surrounded by journalists who had come from around the world to document his final days, some of whom were hoping he would overcome the pneumonia of which he died.
Wittgenstein would have known all these details when he read the Gospel in Brief and fell in love with it. Everyone knew about Tolstoy, even people who never read his writing.
He would also have read the following lines in the Gospel in Brief, many times[6]:
And a rich official among the orthodox went up to Jesus, and said to him: "You are a good teacher, what shall I do to receive everlasting life?" Jesus said: "Why do you call me good? Only the Father is good. But, if you wish to have life, fulfil the commandments." The official said: "There are many commandments; which do you mean?" And Jesus said: "Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not lie, Do not steal. Further, honour your Father, and fulfil His will; and love your neighbour as yourself." But the orthodox official said: "All these commandments I have fulfilled from my childhood; but I ask, what else must one do, according to your teaching?" Jesus looked at him, at his rich dress, and smiled, and said: "One small thing you have left undone. You have not fulfilled that which you say. If you wish to fulfil these commandments: Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not lie, and, above all, the commandment: Love your neighbour as yourself, -- then, at once sell all your goods, and give them to the poor. Then you will have fulfilled the Father's will." Having heard this, the official frowned, and went away, because he was loth to part with his estates. And Jesus said to his disciples: "As you see, it is in no wise possible to be rich, and to fulfil the Father's will." The disciples were horrified at these words, so Jesus once more repeated them, and said: "Yes, children, he who has his own property, cannot be in the will of the Father. Sooner may a camel pass through a needle's eye than he who trusts in wealth fulfil the will of the Father." And they were still more horrified, and said: "But, in that case, is it at all possible to keep one's life?" He said: "To man it seems impossible to support one's life without property; but God, even without property, can support a man's life."
There are other passages similar to this in the Gospel in Brief, all of which would have weighed heavily on the soul of one such as Wittgenstein. Descriptions of the way he studied and think are hard to read because he took everything so seriously, like no one ever before. Therefore he got the point Tolstoy was making. He read the book, saw what Tolstoy was doing at the end of his life, and followed suit with his own life. Note the similarity between their two lifestyles, and if you want extra credit, compare with Gandhi, who was also deeply inspired by Tolstoy, with whom he corresponded up to the time he died.
If there remains any doubt in the hypothesis that Toltoy's Gospel deeply influenced Wittgenstein to an end of words modeled on the teachings of Christ, consider this description of Wittgenstein by his friend Bertrand Russell, as the Tractatus was being prepared for publication:
After meeting with Wittgenstein, Russell wrote a letter in late 1919 to Lady Ottoline Morrell describing the encounter. He wrote (emphasis mine):
I had felt in his book a flavour of mysticism, but was astonished when I found that he has become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and Angelus Silesius, and he seriously contemplates becoming a monk. It all started from William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, and grew (not unnaturally) during the winter he spent alone in Norway before the war, when he was nearly mad. Then during the war a curious thing happened. He went on duty to the town of Tarnov in Galicia, and happened to come upon a bookshop, which, however, seemed to contain just one book: Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought it merely because there was no other, He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times. But on the whole he likes Tolstoy less than Dostoewski (especially Karamazov). He has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though hhe wouldn't agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking. I don't much think he will really become a monk -- it is an idea, not an intention. His intention is to be a teacher. He gave all his money to his brothers and sisters, because he found earthly possessions a burden. I wish you had seen him.
There is more to say here in support of Wittgenstein concluding the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with silent action instead of words, but this is sufficient for now, enough to give any skeptic room to pause, because I want to conclude the underlying point I'm making about the "Awakening Deep."
On writing what is impossible to say
In words, for those who missed what I was implying throughout the above sections, I was given a gift this morning. It is a keystone which completes many years of searching. It is of such a quality that a large amount of research done searching for this keystone exists and now carries a host of related insights which hold together coherently. As I finish writing the article about ternary and binary logic, I will be placing the first stone in the mansion I was talking about earlier. It is a cornerstone.
I can already see another cornerstone will be placed in another unfinished article, which I began nearly a year ago called, "On writing what is impossible to say, on what cannot be said but only shown." It is already a long article, but only about half-finished. I will also be publishing it here soon, and will link back to this present article when it is completed.
There are other stones which I am still seeking as I build this mansion, key concepts which knit together many threads in logic, philosophy, math, physics, and more. There is actually enough work for dozens of people to each publish dozens of papers because it touches on many fields at a pretty fundamental level, but it appears to be my labor to lay a solid foundation. So it's an overwhelming labor, but I've made some progress: For more than a decade I have been gathering all kinds of building materials in various private math and philosophy journals, some portions of which are published on this site throughout this weblog's history. I recently crossed over a million words in one of my private math journals, most of which is copy-pasted quotations from scientific journals, books, podcasts, and so forth, but interwoven with my own observations, all of which will need to be organized into several published books and probably a dozen carefully-researched papers.
The End.
There. That's a much better ending than what I had written last night before the Deep showed me how to crack the code on the binary/ternary problem this morning.
But wait.
Wait a minute...
I thought I was finally done with this article until I began reading the whole thing from its beginning, which now seems so far away, and I came upon this unfulfilled promise in the first paragraph: "Normally I publish after some editing, and normally I keep such pedantic details to myself, but today there is a point I want to make about this state of abeyance, between when an idea begins to form, and when its first draft comes into its rough-hewn being. This moment half-exists, being neither non-existent, nor existent, which is a point I'll get back to at the end of this article." That point hasn't been made yet, and here we are at the end. So let's fulfill that promise.
A state of abeyance, between when an idea forms, and when its first draft comes into its rough-hewn being
To conclude, I confess first that yet another meditation brought me back to concluding this article with a reference to the beginning. While editing for clarity, I had deleted the introductory sentences quoted in the preceding paragraph, thinking that the point about abeyance was too obscure the weigh down an already long article. But then yesterday's meditation (it is now a month since I first started writing) revealed that it is important to include this point... and why. Thankfully, I had previously copied the deleted sentence to the end of the article above and had not deleted it yet, so I was able to copypaste it back into place in the beginning.
Whew. This makes a circle out of the article since it now will end where it began. A quick glance using the word-count feature of a text editor reveals that the phrase "God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference everywhere" is now the center of this article, which indicates that perhaps I've written a sphere instead of a circle.
But getting back to the state of abeyance:
Thanks to this latest meditation, I see clearly now how everyone can access the Deep, and how some people already are but don't realize it. Remember how I was talking about the secret place which is hidden in plain sight? This is like that: The Deep is already part of everyone's awareness, but we block it out on a culture-wide level. This is global; even people in the East, which have cultures oriented around the Tao and other such deeply non-dual concepts, are participating in blocking out their perception of the Deep. (This is what I could see in the meditation, even though it seems counterintuitive). Consider the famous Yin and Yang symbol as a way to convey this -- there is an obvious duality there, and a less-obvious triality embedded in that symbol which refers to the deeper unity understood as the Tao. So even though the East correctly understands the place of the Deep, it is obscured beneath an overt emphasis on duality, as I will explain in more detail below.
Excluding the middle removes reference to that which holds everything together
The logical ordering of these three layers: duality, triality, unity, is important. That is the correct order, not one, two, three as we normally learn, but one, three, two. However, that sequence is a superficial way of saying something much deeper. The reason for this out-of-order ordering is plain once you understand something about which I hinted several times earlier in this article which is subtle. It took me about a decade of study in order to comprehend, so do not expect it to make sense at first.
Just as C. S. Peirce was saying, ternary logic is more fundamental than binary logic. Therefore, binary logic is forged out of ternary, not the other way around as we, embedded in binary perception, normally believe. I have written about this extensively elsewhere, so I'll summarize here with a single sentence: Binary logic is ternary logic which excludes the middle portion. The excluded "excluded middle" is precisely where unifying happens. Thus binary logic leaves out the unifying, which is the "one" of the "one, three, two" ordering.
Since binary logic explicitly excludes true unity, the so-called "unity" which exists within binary logic (i.e. the one of the famous zero-and-one) is an abstraction of the true unity of ternary logic. It is not a direct implementation, but an abstraction. This is very important, so let me say that again: "Binary logic excludes unity, and therefore the 'unity' which exists within binary logic is an abstraction of the unity of ternary logic." If that's not easy to understand, hang on, because it's about to get even weirder as we look more closely at the concept of unity within ternary logic.
The unity within ternary logic
The unity of ternary logic is not really "one" qua "the number one" because ternary unity exists in a pre-counting realm, an undivided realm for which we have no language in Western culture. The unity of ternary logic took more than a decade to find because it doesn't exist in my native language. I knew it existed but could not find it until I had studied many, many paradoxes and thought experiments which all led to dead ends. Each provided a small glimpse into something deeper. Slowly, the nature of unity in ternary logic began to make sense.
As I described earlier, the closest we come to the undivided realm in the West is the Tao. However, geographically in the middle of the East and West -- in the Middle East -- there is another related concept which I mentioned earlier: the Ein Sof. Ein Sof translates from Hebrew roughly to "without end" and thus suffers from that same negative-duality issue I mentioned earlier with the Western way of saying "non-dual" more than a single syllable when we mean something "singular."
If you get a map of Earth and draw an arrow from the furthest eastern point to the furthest western point, you can chart the idea of non-duality transforming across geography. It is strongest in the Far East, transitioning to something different in the Mideast, and finally no longer existing in the West.
Speaking about the unspeakable Ein Sof
If you are very loose with definitions, and keep in mind that arrow of how non-duality transforms geographically as it moves around the globe from east to west, it can be said that Ein Sof is talking about the same underlying concept as Tao, although Ein Sof adds a certain "divine personality" dimension to the relatively impersonal Tao. Let's be careful on this point: I do not encourage this equivocation except for the purposes of this present explanation of how the West has a very different idea of "one" than the East. Saying that Ein Sof has a divine personality is saying something which ought not be taken out of context. Here it is said in a temporary, disposable, manner in the course of making some other point comparing it to the relatively more impersonal Tao.
I'm being careful here because all rabbis who speak of Ein Sof do so carefully, perhaps more careful than even a Confucian monk would speak of the Tao, because of the Hebraic emphasis on not saying the name of God. Instead of saying the name of God, rabbis often say "HaShem" which literally translates to "The Name." Or they will use "Adonai" which means "The Lord." There is in Hebrew no casual use of the name of God because it is considered to be so holy. Yet Ein Sof is considered to be even more unspeakable than the tetragrammaton "YHWH." Knowing this, I'm careful to point out when I'm "misusing" such names, and why.
Some rabbis will even refuse to speak of Ein Sof altogether, but those who do, know this: "The first rule of Ein Sof is that you don't talk about Ein Sof," to paraphrase an idea made popular with the movie Fight Club. Rabbis will only very briefly mention Ein Sof and then turn attention to other parts of the conversation because to say anything about Ein Sof is... basically to speak nonsense, in much the same way that Wittgenstein spoke of his own book as nonsense.
So the Mideast has the same general idea about the unspeakable unity as what can be seen in the East, but curiously it is implemented with an even stronger emphasis on the unspeakability. It's literally unspoken. In the Mideast, only profane fools talk of the Ein Sof, whereas in the East, there are extremely popular books such as the Tao Te Ching which go into great detail about the nature of the unspeakable. This is an important but subtle distinction which could cause controversy if not understood carefully, so let me repeat:
In the East, even common people know and talk about the unspeakable Tao. In the Mideast, most common people do not even know about the unspeakable Ein Sof because rabbis who do know about Ein Sof speak cryptically, very little, or not at all about the unspeakable. In the West, common people have no concept of unspeakable things and have a very hard time comprehending such a thing even exists.
So let's summarize this peculiar trio, keeping in mind the geographic arrow:
- In the East, the Tao, Wu-Wei, etc. are concepts widely known. The unspeakable aspect is understood, well known, and described, as in the Tao Te Ching. It is understood to be talking about a graceful balance point between opposites like Yin and Yang, the balance point revealing a trinity hidden within a duality, all of which together reveals a singularity.
- In the Mideast, where East and West meet, the "universal Tao" of the East takes on a divine, more "personal" nature known as Ein Sof, yet those who know Ein Sof best do not even speak of it openly, to the degree that the unspeakable is not widely known.
- In the West, there is no native understanding of a universal Tao. There is no commonly-used singular word for what we call "non-dual" using negating-concrete words like "e-ternal," "in-finite," "ab-solute," etc. Such words distort the "un-divided" singularity of the underlying concept, but nobody cares because even the priest class has no access to the unspeakable realm.
This trio is utterly fascinating. Of course, in a detailed analysis, there are also North and South hemispheres which should be factored in, but the takeaway here is this: True non-duality is just not a Western concept.
And here I am in the Midwest trying to write about it in a way that is neither Eastern, nor Mideastern, nor Western. And yet it's also all three.
How to find the Deep: in the space between stimulus and response
Remember we're still talking about the abeyance with which this article began, meaning the condition of being neither here nor there, but in between.
People who practice mindfulness talk about a mindful pause before speaking. According to what I learned in this morning's meditation, this pause is precisely where we can individually connect to the Deep and begin allowing it to flow into our lives. This simple action puts our brain into a state of abeyance where it becomes receptive to deeper awarenesses than usual.
I did a little research, which confirms what I learned: Neuroscience shows that such a pause engages the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC) in the brain. Activating the RVLPFC inhibits the amygdala's stream of negative emotional reactions. Distilling from a number of studies and articles I reviewed[7] here is the best summary of how this cortex works, from a research paper called The brain's braking system (and how to use your words to tap into it):
The results across all of these domains of self-control clearly point to RVLPFC as a hub involved in virtually every form of self-control no matter how different the forms of self-control feel or how distinct the demands necessary to achieve self-control in each. Consequently, it is appropriate to refer to RVLPFC as the brain’s braking system. As I mentioned earlier, there are different brain regions involved in each type of self-control, however, only RVLPFC seems to be involved in every identified form of intentional self-control.
In addition to managing self-control, this region is involved in speech processing. Therefore we can engage this region in many ways, including simply labeling our emotions as we feel them. But most useful for the purposes of this article, when we pause for a moment before speaking, this cortex gets involved. It begins to inhibit quick-react emotions from flowing into what we say. It changes what we say! Hence, what we speak becomes more mindful. More thoughtful. More aware of deep context that we otherwise miss. We don't have to make that thoughtfulness part happen. It just happens if we do the pause.
There's a famous quote attributed to Viktor Frankl[8] which captures this moment well:
Between the stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
This "space" is created by the mindful pause. Here in the West, we live in a culture which has no sense of the mindful pause. When we speak, we zoom right past that moment and thus let our amygdala guide more of what we say and do. If you know anything about the amygdala (it primarily processes fear responses and negative emotions), you know this is not optimal. Thankfully, we can train ourselves to engage this elusive moment at will by simply pausing briefly for a long enough time to allow our brain to switch to a more thoughtful context, which it does, given the chance.
This elusive moment is where we are blocking out the Deep from speaking in its wordless way. In the West, we have done this incrementally more for many centuries, tracing back to the advent of binary logic with Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics in ancient Greece 2,500 years ago. Some might trace the beginning further back, to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which happened about 4,000 years ago according to Julian Jaynes. When this process began remains to be properly identified, but the important fact is that the end of that long disconnect is arriving -- a global unity is coming -- if we Allow the Deep to Speak.
Saying this, it feels to me like the Deep is the long-lost part of our consciousness where we are all connected to each other. Hence, integrating the mindful pause, the art of abeyance, into our culture will allow the Deep to speak on the large scale that is necessary to change everything.
Everything. I get the sense that the Enlightenment happened the last time we got this close to the Deep.
Footnotes
- a, b Dramatic Relief is a term I just coined, kind of like comedic relief but more serious.
- ^ In meditation, one ascends, right? Yet meditation is largely a form of relinquishing ego, and a great ego thinks itself ascended, right? So therefore meditation is a descent away from ego at the same time as it is an ascent into the sublime.
- ^ Time machines are impossible in the manner they are usually portrayed in movies. The physics of time reveals that future Time Travel "machines" will simply be virtual reality implementations -- very much like high-fidelity first-person video games -- which become increasingly accurate in their portrayal of past and future. This is because time does not exist in a way that can be navigated with a machine as movies like Back to the Future and Dr. Who portray.
- ^ To be honest, there are a few people who do assume the truth of a fundamental layer of unity (pantheists and panpsychists), but these are fields with a lot of nonscientific wishful thinking. They have lately been experiencing a renaissance of scientific rigor and penetrating inquiry, so I keep an open mind. I think what I'm developing here is a variation on these themes which it may be inappropriate to classify with them... at least yet. Panentheist-psychist-idealist is how I would classify myself right now, I think. Or perhaps Huxley's perennial philosophy is where I'll eventually find a home? By hyphenating these three approaches, I want to point out how they are considered largely compatible but also differ in important ways. So until these concerns are resolved the phrase "assumed to be true by no one" is still appropriate here.
- ^ Apparently, Francis of Assisi never said these exact words. None of his disciples or biographers recorded them nor do they show up in any of his writings. The closest comes from his Rule of 1221, Chapter XII on how the Franciscans should practice their preaching: "No brother should preach contrary to the form and regulations of the holy Church nor unless he has been permitted by his minister ... All the Friars ... should preach by their deeds." Some quibble about this not being the exact words, but it's a "spirit of the law" vs the "letter of the law" matter for me, and that's close enough. It's what Francis meant. The more concise urban-legend Internet version carries the same general idea.
- ^ Or if that quoted passage is not enough, there's more. The way Tolstoy gathered together everything Jesus said on a single topic makes such points stronger. For example, imagine you're stupendously wealthy while reading the following: "And Jesus said: "Beware of wealth, because your life does not depend upon your having more than others. There was a rich man, who had a great harvest of corn. And he thought to himself: 'Let me rebuild my barns. I will erect larger ones, and gather there all my wealth. And I will say to my soul: "There, my soul, you have everything after your desire; rest, eat, drink, and live for your pleasure.'" But God said to him: 'Fool, this very night your soul shall be taken; and all that you have stored up shall go to others.' And thus it happens with everyone who provides for the bodily life, and does not live in God. All know that the fulfilment of the will of the Father gives life, but do not go because the guile of wealth draws them away. He who resigns false temporary wealth for the true life in the will of the Father, does as did a certain clever steward. There was a man who was steward to a rich master. This steward saw that, sooner or later, the master would drive him away, and that he would remain without food, and without shelter. And the steward thought to himself: 'This is what I will do: I will privately distribute the master's goods to the labourers; I will reduce their debts, and then, if the master drives me out, the labourers will remember my kindness, and will not abandon me.' And so the steward did. He called the labourers, his master's debtors, and re-wrote their documents. For him who owed a hundred he wrote fifty; for him who owed sixty, he wrote twenty, and similarly for the rest. And the master learned this, and said to himself: 'Well, he has done wisely; otherwise he would have had to beg his bread. To me he has caused a loss, but his own reckoning was wise.' For, in the fleshly life, we all understand wherein is the true reckoning, but in the life of the spirit, we do not wish to understand. Thus must we do with unjust, false wealth -- give it up, in order to receive the life of the spirit. And if we regret to give up such trifles as wealth for the life of the spirit, then this life will not be given us. If we do not give up false wealth, then our own true life will not be given us. It is impossible to serve two masters at one time; to serve God and Wealth, the will of the Father, and one's own will. Either one or the other." And the orthodox heard this. But loving wealth, they jeered at him. And he said to them: "You think that, because men honour you on account of wealth, you are really honourable. It is not so. God does not look at the exterior, but looks at the heart. That which stands high among men, is abomination in the eyes of God. Now the kingdom of heaven is attainable on earth, and great are they who enter it. But there enter it, not the rich, but those who have nothing. And this has always been so, both according to your law, and according to Moses, and according to the prophets also. Listen. How does it stand with rich and poor in your way of thinking? There was a rich man. He dressed well, led an idle and amusing life every day. And there was a vagrant, Lazarus, covered with sores. And Lazarus came to the yard of the rich man, and thought there would be leavings from the rich man's table, but Lazarus did not get even the leavings, the rich man's dogs ate up everything, and even licked Lazarus' sores. And both these died, Lazarus and the rich man. And in Hades, the rich man saw, far off, Abraham; and behold, Lazarus, the beggar, was sitting with him. And the rich man said: 'Father Abraham, see, Lazarus the beggar is sitting with you. He used to wallow under my fence, I dare not trouble you, but send Lazarus the beggar to me; let him but wet his finger in water, to cool my throat, because I am burning in the fire.' But Abraham said: 'But why should I send Lazarus into the fire to you? You, in that other world, had what you wished, but Lazarus only saw grief; so that he ought now to be happy. Yes, and though I should like to help you, I cannot, because between us and you there is a great pit, and it is impossible to cross it. We are living, but you are dead.' Then the rich man said: 'Well, Father Abraham, send Lazarus the beggar to my home. I have five brothers; I am sorry for them. Let him tell everything to them, and show how harmful wealth is; so that they may not fall into this torture.' But Abraham said: 'As it is, they know the harm. They were told of it by Moses, and by all the prophets.' But the rich man said: 'Still, it would be better if someone should rise from the dead, and go to them; they would the sooner bethink themselves.' But Abraham said: 'But if they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, then, even if a dead man came to life, they would not listen, even to him.' That one should share all with one's brother, and do good to everybody; this all men know. And the whole law of Moses, and all the prophets, said only this: You know this truth, but cannot do it, because you love wealth."
- ^ Here is a list of articles and studies talking about various aspects of how the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortext redirects consciousness away from reaction-based amygdala and toward more thoughtful, context-aware right hemisphere processing known as mindfulness:
The Brain’s Braking System (and how to 'use your words' to tap into it): This whole article is very readable and an incredible gem for anyone who wants to immediately understand how mindfulness works according to science, because it summarizes a lot of the best research in this area. The quote cited above in my article is good, but here is more: "Nevertheless, when participants saw a nogocue that happened to include a negative emotional expression, their attempt at inhibiting their motor response produced an unintentional side effect -- their amygdala response to the negative expression was also inhibited. Moreover the magnitude of the amygdala decrease was associated with the magnitude of the RVLPFC response during motor inhibition. Thus, even though participants felt like they were only inhibiting a motor response, they unintentionally inhibited their emotional response as well. This finding makes perfect sense if RVLPFC is seen as a common mechanism in the brain’s braking system. Turning on the braking system for any reason is likely to have broad self-control effects beyond the particular response one is hoping to inhibit."
This is exciting! Read the paper for more. I'm particularly excited about this insight because I have prayed specifically for an understanding of how to gain better control over how I use words (for the reasons noted early in the article above). So this insight is an answered prayer.
Putting Feelings Into Words Produces Therapeutic Effects In The Brain: A new brain imaging study by psychologists reveals why verbalizing our feelings makes our sadness, anger and pain less intense. A second study combines modern neuroscience with ancient Buddhist teachings to provide the first neural evidence for why "mindfulness" -- the ability to live in the present moment, without distraction -- seems to produce a variety of health benefits.
Different Roles of the Left and Right Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Cognitive Reappraisal
Neural Correlates of Dispositional Mindfulness During Affect Labeling
What happens in the brain when we pause?
What Mindfulness Does to Your Brain: The Science of Neuroplasticity
Why You Should Always Take a Mindful Pause Before Reacting
The Brain and Language
The VLPFC-Engaged Voluntary Emotion Regulation: Combined TMS-fMRI Evidence for the Neural Circuit of Cognitive Reappraisal
Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex Plays an Executive Regulation Role in Comprehension of Abstract Words: Convergent Neuropsychological and Repetitive TMS Evidence - ^ Viktor Frankl did not actually write this, but it is usually attributed to him for the following reason: The quote was first written by a student of his, Steven Covey, who was remembering something he'd read years before, thinking it was by Viktor Frankl when he quoted it in one of his books. However, research indicates that it was not Frankl, but likely a similar quote from Rollo May in a 1963 article titled "Freedom and Responsibility Re-Examined." Here is Rollo May's quote: "Freedom is thus not the opposite to determinism. Freedom is the individual’s capacity to know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it may be, on the side of one particular response among several possible ones." Rollo May mentioned this idea in numerous ways throughout his writings, and Viktor Frankl talked about similar things but not with these words. So who would you attribute, Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, or Steven Covey?